#there's something very symbolic to me about this being turned back on Gansey | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

eury--dice · 4 years

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history, huh?

chapter 3: propius

(check the rb for chapters 1 + 2 on tumblr + ao3 links!)

Adam was woken at 5 o’clock on the dot with a series of sharp knocks on his door. “Up and Adam,” Gansey’s voice called, making the one stupid dad joke that always set Adam’s blood to a boil. He was too tired to react, however.

“Kindly leave until a later time,” he called, his voice heavy with sleep. “I don’t have class for another three hours.”

Gansey opened the door anyway, striding in with more pep than anyone should have in the morning.

“You’ve made the tabloids, my friend. Your weekend with Ronan finally hit.”

“Did you sleep at all?”

“Nope,” Gansey said cheerfully. “‘From America, With Love: Ronan and Adam flaunt friendship.’” He turned on his heel once he’d crossed the length of the room, which Adam could never forget was formerly Malia Obama’s, and seated himself in Adam’s desk chair.

Adam had never been closer to considering strangulation. He elected to shove his hearing ear into his pillow instead.

Unfortunately, the muffled sounds of Gansey speaking still made their way in. “‘Photos: Adam’s Weekend in England,’ oh, that’s boring…ah-hah: ‘New Bromance Alert? Pics of FSOTUS and Prince Ronan.’”

Adam resigned himself to his fate and mentally promised himself a giant cup of coffee. “As long as I’m getting fewer death threats on Twitter, I’m happy,” he mumbled into his blankets.

Gansey ignored him. “Why are you so tired? It’s the hour of kings, time to be awake and alive.”

“I’d settle for dead if it meant I could sleep at this point, to be frank.”

“Please don’t be frank. Be Adam.”

Adam sat up, eyeing Gansey in his wire-framed glasses with disdain. “Any more puns and I suffocate myself with this pillow.”

“Please don’t,” Gansey said, but his eyes had already returned to his screen. While he read through the articles, he continued his line of questioning. “Working on the campaign late last night?”

“Not really,” Adam admitted. “I had a Press and the Presidency paper to write.”

“Just write ‘I’m Adam Parrish’ on a piece of loose-leaf paper to turn it in and you’ll probably get an A. You live it every day, for Christ’s sake.”

“And yet I still need to cite sources in Chicago Advanced.”

“You’d think nepotism would work out more in your favor.” He flicked to a fresh article, a gesture Adam only recognized from all the other times Gansey had done it. “Luckily, I think the press is eating this one up.”

Adam grimaced. “Fantastic.”

“Not-campaign-ruining, you mean.”

“That too, I suppose.” He wanted nothing more than to flop back against his pillows and get the sleep his body so desperately craved after being jet lagged for a week, but he fought the urge.

“That _ People _exclusive takes the cake, I think. I didn’t realize how much you cherished your relationship with Ronan.”

“Fuck off, please. Or end my misery.”

“No to both. Why are you even taking that press course?”

Adam slid out from under his blankets, rolling his shoulders to try and wake up more. “Curiosity, I guess. It never hurts to learn more of what not to do.”

Gansey looked up from his phone to level a glance at Adam. “And what have you learned so far?”

“…Don’t have a sex scandal?”

“You _ would _need someone to tell you that.”

_ “Hey,” _Adam said, affecting outrage.

Gansey lifted his thumb to run over his lower lip, tilting his head consideringly. “One of us three will probably have a scandal before your mother’s second term is up.”

“If there is a second.”

“Chin up, young padawan. With you working on it we’re guaranteed.”

“I don’t know, Gansey,” Adam replied. “I don’t think I’m the good luck charm you believe in.”

“Of course you are,” Gansey said. “We won the first time, no?”

Adam glanced exaggeratedly around the room and to the phone in Gansey’s hand. “I’d say so. That or we’re about to get questioned very thoroughly about the the events of last three years.”

“Don’t make me cut you off on the true-crime videos.”

His eyes narrowed, focusing on Gansey. “Don’t you dare.”

“Blue agrees, anyway,” Gansey said, successfully deflecting topics. “Said there’s a ninety-four percent chance you’ll get into a sex scandal before the general.”

“Both of you date more than I do, why am I the one who’s supposedly having a sex scandal?” Once his initial outrage passed, disbelief crept in at the time of day. “Did you just text Blue at five AM and get a response? How the hell did you manage that?”

“She’s been up,” Gansey dismissed. Adam stared at him for a moment, and then Gansey seemed to feel the weight of his stare. His eyes widened almost comically. “Oh, Christ, no, not that. Nate Silver asked for another set of eyes on the Superbowl predictions, and she’s trying to get a shoo-in with them before the primaries begin. I just brought her some coffee.”

“And you didn’t bring me any?”

“You’re the only one of us who hasn’t been up all night. You need coffee the least of all of us.”

“Don’t blame me for your bad decisions.” Adam squinted at Gansey. “Were you working on an article all night or something?”

He snorted. “Hardly. They’ve been blocking all of my pieces. Too far from my mother’s politics, too far from your mother’s, too controversial, too critical, all in that order.”

“Thought you were liking the _ Post _gig?”

“On paper,” Gansey dismissed. “I’ve defaulted to writing about Welsh history.”

“Sounds like it’s right up your alley, then.”

“Once again, on paper.”

“How do you even connect the Welsh to the hellscape of American politics?”

Gansey waved a hand. “‘Eternal spirit,’ ‘fighting for honor,’ ‘remembering Glendower and others who set a pristine model,’ et cetera, et cetera.”

“People read that? That just sounds like you in high school spouting off again.”

“Yes, Adam. People read it.” Gansey squinted at his phone again. “Twitter _ really _likes you and Ronan together.”

“We’re exciting,” Adam said dryly, reaching for his laptop. He scanned over his most recent paper while Gansey dramatically narrated replies to the gif of them on _ This Morning. _

“‘Either of them could stab me and give me one of those smiles and I’d thank them,’ Jesus Christ,” Gansey read, “They really love your fake smiles… ‘name a more iconic duo, I’ll wait,’ hm, maybe any other duo? ‘Oh my God, just _ kiss already.’” _

Adam choked out a laugh as Gansey punctuated the last one with a dramatic and uncharacteristic hand wave. “At least it’s working,” he allowed, shutting his laptop once he felt secure about his essay. “Now get out. _ Some _of us have places to be.”

Adam’s phone buzzed on his way out of his cursed Presidency and the Press course.

Somehow, the interest of those around him seemed to pique even higher when he looked at his phone instead of in front of him. It wasn’t a new sensation by any means; ever since starting at Georgetown, he’d felt eyes on him constantly, but the intensity increased tenfold each time his classmates thought he was too occupied to see them staring. He noticed every time, but of course nothing could be done about it.

The name _ HRH shitty bird boy _ popped across his screen. How strange - in only a week, he’d almost entirely forgotten that the name he had (quite maturely) given Ronan in his phone was… _ that. _As he swiped the notification open, he felt a certain amount of trepidation as to what a technology-averse prince would ever text him about.

His harassment and emergency fears flew out the window with the body of the text, simply a screenshot of their tabloid appearance with the added caption of _ youre the nerd and I’m the cool jock. _

_ Competitive yachting? _Adam asked in response, nearly tripping over his own feet while typing.

_ ffs i told them to stop writing that as my preferred sport. _

Adam felt his lips twist against his will.

_ I’m sorry, this is a common problem? _

_ you can’t even imagine. _

_ I appreciate that they consider competitive yachting a regal sport. _

_ status symbols and faux athleticism are the core of the monarchy. _

Adam blinked down at his phone, stopping short abruptly. Persephone, from behind him, adjusted accordingly.

He…hadn’t been expecting this. Any of it. The text, the almost-joking response, the casual statement about the monarchy being ridiculous despite him being in it. Their conversation ended there, and it was probably for the better. He resumed his pace, trying to get to his next class. He almost forgot about the texts, too; save for a rogue screenshot Adam sent him of speculation on Ronan’s presence in Majorca, nothing else went between them.

Sometimes, Adam could _ just barely _ get away with being on his phone during briefings with Maura. He hated to be distracted during them - they were _ important, _he knew that, but all the same occasionally she spent a particularly long time covering an obscure dignitary’s comments and he’d gotten too few hours of sleep to truly focus and someone or other was blowing up his phone.

Maura’s topic of conversation this week appeared to be a series of Buzzfeed articles run on the lack of pets in the First Family, complete with a power point dissecting their points

The glamorous side of politics, truly. Discussing a clickbait series in the West Wing briefing room.

_ iMessage chat to _ ** HRH shitty bird boy **

_ Resumed 30 October, 2019, 1:47 pm _

_ if you want a pet chainsaw dragged in a mouse the other day _

_ Ah yes, the mouse. A pet eternally beloved by constituents. _

_ we can’t all have a raven, that would be unfair _

_ Your heights of cool and goth are truly dizzying. _

_ im glad you agree _

_ Modest, too. _

_ it comes with the wealth and fame _

_ As long as you’re being straight with me, feel free to be as ‘modest’ as you like. _

_ i’m the prince of bloody england. i’m straight all the damn time _

_ That’s the biggest lhxemxlp_

His phone slipped from between his fingers, landing with a dull _ thud _onto the wooden floor. Adam stared helplessly at it, a sleek black rectangle hiding between types of oak. But Maura repeated his name, and he suddenly remembered what had made him drop his phone in the first place. He dragged his eyes up, staring at a spot on the sterile white wall just beyond Maura’s head.

“Adam,” she said a third time, but he refused to look her in the eyes. She conceded immediately. “What the hell?”

He felt his cheeks darken as blood found its way up. “I’m sorry.”

Her lips thinned just like Blue’s did, turning into a dark line on her brown face. “Do you even remember what I was saying?”

“Er…” he scrambled. “Don’t mention animals in any public setting?”

She looked at him for a long moment, then picked up a mug of coffee and took a controlled sip.

“Get out?” she said once she’d swallowed her sip.

“I-”

She pointed to the door. “I am impossibly busy. Take your phone and go laugh in private.”

He nodded once, finally, ducking under the table with his spine pressed against the bottom to grab his phone. His fingers closed around it, grip the edge of the wood, and he was up in a second.

He couldn’t regret it.

Because - well, here was the weird thing.

He wanted another text from Ronan.

_ iMessage chat to _ ** HRH shitty bird boy **

_ Resumed 31 October, 2019, 12:03 am _

_ it’s finally spooky day in your hell country _

_ Isn’t it 5 am in England? _

_ Do you ever sleep? _

_ bold of you to ask that question _

_ halloween, bitch _

_ it waits for no one _

_ I’m really going to have to advocate better habits. _

_ I understand, you’re enthused for Halloween. _

_ do you even care at all _

_ I enjoy halloween like everyone else. _

_ Though your level of excitement feels a little pagan? _

when the skeleton army rises Jesus will forgive me

_ appreciate this glorious day parrish _

_ I have enough fear in my daily life, thanks. _

_ I filed my own taxes all throughout highschool. _

_ And payed rent. _

_ The horrors of early adulthood. _

_terrifying _

_ terrible i’ll never deal with that shit _

_ You’re the prince, we know. _

_ Do you also not have enough horror in your life? _

of course i do

_ but parrish. listen. _

_ this is the one day a year all the monarchy and parliament dress as they are in life _

_ hideous monsters _

He laughed a little harder at that than he should have.

_ You’re telling me the monarchy plays dress up. _

_ ronan_frankensteins_monser_costume.jpg _

_ matthew insisted. did this on me an hour ago _

_ oh my god _

The makeup _ was _really good, and the monstrous look suited him, but hell if Adam ever said that to him.

He may have saved it to his phone, though, to glimpse Ronan’s green-paint covered skin and crooked, drawn-on stitch smile on his perfectly blank face.

Although Adam certainly didn’t intend to make a habit of texting the Prince of England, when he saw a funny bird or a stupid article or an obscure meme his first thought became _I should send that to Ronan. _And Ronan, clearly, was thinking along the same lines. The sheer number of sole emojis that seemed to tell a Ronan-centric story he received at all hours only affirmed that. And somehow, between all the pictogramme and jokes, he started to learn snatches of information. Declan was a better storyteller than Ronan, Matthew was the only person who could make Ronan attend family dinners ever since their father died, and his mother - the Queen of England, Adam had to remind himself sometimes - drew further away every day.

The problem became that he always wanted to know _ more, _and Adam didn’t know if that was due to his rampant curiosity or something else buried deep inside of him, and he was too afraid of what he might uncover by digging to look.

Adam had very few friends.

Most of that came with the territory of being part of the First Family; nothing made casual acquaintances drift away quite like being constantly surveilled by Secret Service agents and trailed by NDAs. Adam didn’t have time for small talk and coffee, a fact which he sometimes lamented and often loved. Part of this came from the type of friendship he became accustomed to with Gansey and Blue, the all-encompassing type of friendship that took over their minds in spare moments and forged ties stronger than steel between them. He’d probably forgotten how to have normal, casual friends, not friends an outsider would think he was completely in love with. And, perhaps more than anything else, it came back down to Robert Parrish and his heavy hands and ringing words. Adam’s memories of his first few years were scattered and inconsistent, but they filled up a too-large corner of his brain all the same. Blue, who entered his life at the tender age of 5, had won his trust with greater ease than their other peers, and Gansey had done the same in high school. They knew him and what he’d been through, and so they could (platonically) love him for all that he was. When campaigning and political office came into the mix, that full truth of Adam Parrish became a secret to guard like any else.

But, oddly enough, Adam had a third friend: Noah Czerny, the thirty-three-year-old baby of the Senate.

Noah and Adam met through an Aglionby networking event while Adam was a student and Noah a recently-elected congressperson, both green as grass in different ways. Adam, thrown neck-deep into a Presidential campaign, had questions, and most of the time Noah had answers. Although all of the professors had warned Adam to proceed cautiously with Czerny, Adam found nothing to fear. Noah had mellowed out quite a bit from his high school days, becoming a familiar face at political events and a surprisingly-wise piece of advice always at the ready. Despite Adam’s near hero-worship of this brand-new politician, half-Mexican just like him and just as frequent to lose sleep rewriting policies that unjustly taxed communities of color or defunded children’s education, they’d formed an improbable bond. The summer before his sophomore year, Noah let Adam closer to the politics process than even his mother had as he ran for the Senate, and Adam took to it almost at once. A politician twelve years his senior was perhaps not a conventional choice of friend, but Adam seldom remained conventional.

It wasn’t too out of the ordinary for Adam to arrive at Noah’s congressional office unannounced, either with business or without, and so when Adam rounded on Noah’s stark, bright, white office, he wasn’t at all surprised to see him ducked over an obscene number of papers.

“It’s Friday night,” Noah said without looking up, barely before Adam had even crossed into the office. As always, the tiny burst of color in the Pride flag deposited in a tourist mug drew Adam’s eye for a long moment before Noah himself did. All Adam could see of him was his brown curls, resolutely held in place even as bent over a desk. “Go party or something.”

“Damn, I didn’t _ think _ this looked like a frat. I knew something was off.” Adam slid into one of the seats across the desk. He had several inches on Noah, but he always felt smaller in those chairs across from the most important legislators in the country. “What’s got you here at eight PM?” Off of Noah’s brief, incredulous look, he amended to _ “this _particular time, I know. You’re salaried. Shouldn’t you…ever go home?”

“I’m trying to get something done so that there’s at least a hope of banning fracking in our lifetimes.”

Adam scoffed quietly, though not for lack of faith in Noah. “Let me know when you’ve cracked the code.”

_ “If, _but sure, I’ll be in contact. Now, why are you here?”

“You didn’t answer my leaving-the-building question.”

Noah’s eyes flickered shut briefly. “Jesus, Adam, I am salaried by the taxpayers of millions of Americans. I’m not going to slack on them.”

“Fine, but don’t make me drag Gansey in here to make you take a long nap and drink some hot soup.”

Adam’s phone buzzed, but he ignored it; despite it being almost 1 am in England, Ronan could presumably take the blame. Noah asked, “Did you catch the Fox town hall last night?”

Adam grimaced. He’d seen part of it, trying to multitask with his macroeconomics homework at the same time, but instead he’d fallen asleep with his head on the laptop screen. “Part of it. It was a shitshow.”

“You can say that again.”

“I honestly thought that Whelk would pull more support from the extremists. He just seemed desperate last night.”

“Oh, he definitely was.” Noah leaned away from his desk, appraising Adam as though considering his words carefully. “We went to school together.”

“Aglionby?” Adam asked. He knit his eyebrows together. “How did I not realize he went there?”

“The school doesn’t exactly love toting him.”

“He’s older than you, though, right?”

“Yes, Adam,” Noah said slowly. “I’m thirty-three. He’s already announced a bid for President. How old do you have to be to run for executive office?”

Adam scowled. “I just came from class, I can’t use my brain. He was a senior when you were a freshman?”

“Yep,” Noah replied. “We were paired in upperclassmen-lowerclassmen bonding.” His lip curled a little. “He outed me.”

“Wait, _ what?” _

“He outed me to the school,” Noah repeated. He looked back down to the papers on his desk, his voice softening to a barely audible level. “I trusted him, which was a dumb thing to do, but I was a really stupid freshman. Scared, too. He was a friendly personality.”

_ “Fuck,” _Adam said, pushing a hand through his hair. “I’m sorry, that’s…”

“Terrible?” A bit of Noah’s life returned to him. “Don’t worry about it, kid. It was years ago.”

“But then…Whelk, he was the reason you…?”

“He didn’t make my parents react the way they did. They did that on their own. But no, they wouldn’t have known without him.”

Adam shook his head. “I thought it wasn’t possible to like the guy less, if only because of his politics, but he’s done it.”

“Done what? Received the full wrath of Adam Parrish?”

“He very well may.”

“Don’t worry about him. Whelk will be out soon, believe me. I know him. He may have his parent’s money, but he’s barely old enough to hold office and he’s running on fumes.”

“If he’s not, I’ll convince Blue to skew stats until he is.” Noah knew just as well as Adam that that wouldn’t change anything, but it lightened the air anyway. “It seems kind of pointless to entertain any of them. Greenmantle is probably going to win no matter what.”

Colin Greenmantle: former antique collector, congressperson from Massachusetts, and millionaire with the funds to take over the Republican primary, and very possibly the whole election, before any papers were even filed.

“It’s early,” Noah said. “Too early to worry about it. Too early to even be _ talking _ about it.”

Adam slanted a half-smile at him. “Never too early to worry about an election.”

Noah looked back to his papers before broaching the next topic. “I hear you’ve got a job on your mother’s re-election campaign.”

“Once I graduate, and maybe a little earlier, yeah.”

Noah cast a glance around the office. “Are you sure this is the life you want?”

Adam knew he was referring to the constant bustle, the fear of disappointing and harming instead of helping, and the ever-evolving media scrutiny. He knew it was the closest Noah would give to a warning. “I’m sure.”

Noah sighed. “Fine.” He pointed to the door. “But I won’t let you throw your youth away, not this early. After you graduate, Parrish. Go get drunk and make out with someone.”

Adam stood, his frame unfolding and standing tall. “You are a terrible role model.”

“Can’t hear you over the loud music.”

“You and Blue and Gansey - if I die of alcohol poisoning, it’s all your fault.”

“Feel free to blame, so long as you’re out there and not here.”

“Alright, alright, Jesus. You’ve made your point.”

“Finally,” Noah called after Adam’s retreating form. But Adam could hear the amusement in his voice all the same.

For someone so allergic and averse to technology, Ronan sure seemed to share a lot with Adam.

_ iMessage chat to _ ** HRH shitty bird boy **

_ Resumed 13 Novemeber, 2019, 8:38 pm _

_ bird.m4a _

_ she wont stop nuzzling my head?? _

_ Picking for lice, probably. _

_ God knows you have so many. _

_ my scalp is perfectly clean _

_ Forgive me for abstaining from running my hands over it all the same. _

_ I’ll leave that to her. _

He didn’t always respond, though.

Adam tried not to read into it.

(He mostly succeeded.)

Adam never tired of stepping into the Oval Office. On the Wednesday right before Thanksgiving, he stepped in with the same amount of awe he always had, allowing himself a single moment to glance around at the wide windows and perfectly upholstered furniture. He sat on one of the couches without preamble.

His mother looked up from what was in front of her on the desk and smiled, albeit a tired one that frayed a bit at the corners; Adam had seen a few particularly troublesome foreign dignitaries be escorted away not long before, so he didn’t have to guess at the reason. Ana looked like she belonged to sit right there amongst all the history at that desk, from the sun dipping just beneath her halo of hair straightened within an inch of its life and her stick-straight posture. It might have been a lot at times, but seeing her was a reminder of all the good that came from her position.

She rose and walked to join him, her heels clacking lightly at the ground before she sank onto the cushion beside him and pulled him into a loose hug. Adam had overtaken Ana in height some years before, but there had been a long gap in there as he grew - like one day he was three and a half feet tall and wrapped tightly in her arms and the next he was off to Georgetown and several heads taller. She pulled away after a minute, slowly and bit-by-bit as though savoring her moments as a mother rather than a president. Her hand reached to muss his hair a moment later, and Adam ducked away instinctively before exchanging an identical grin with her.

“God, I forgot how light your hair looks in here,” she said, leaning back a little. “Almost golden.” She tilted her head as though examining him. “Nah. Still brown. But much lighter.”

“How could you forget? The photo here was in _ GQ, _the same article that first declared me the family golden boy.” At the corner of their conversation was the knowledge of where he’d inherited that hair color, as it sure as hell wasn’t from Ana. But he let the thought stay buried, patting the dirt back down with the shovel himself. Their relationship always had an absence in it, and he didn’t particularly feel like deepening it in the Oval Office.

“Ah, so that’s the one I have to blame for your big head,” she responded, reaching for a piece of fruit from the little coffee table. It was a familiar half-jest, borne from Adam’s constant contradicting confidence and imposter syndrome. Idiosyncrasies were just Adam’s style, never one to make things easy for himself. He sometimes wondered if so much of himself conflicted because he tried to walk the middle road so often, balancing his weight over all sides to minimize the damage if the rug was yanked from beneath him, like lying down on a bed of nails: a thousand tiny, dull pains over one sharp, potentially fatal puncture. She smiled again. “Is Noah doing well?”

“For Noah he is. He would barely look up from some new reports on fracking, seems hopeful he’ll be able to garner enough support.”

Ana snorted. “Good luck with that. I’ll be shocked if it reaches the floor for debate.”

“That makes three of us, then.” He nodded towards the desk. “Bad meeting?”

The frown lines on her face deepened. “Don’t get me started,” she drawled, falling back fully against the cushions. After only a moment, she _ did _ get started regardless of what Adam did or didn’t do. “We received the memo a few days ago that a delegation from Sweden wanted to be in contact, right? Fairly standard stuff, Maura gets back to them quickly because they worded it like it was an urgent matter, and there’s a back and forth for a while about scheduling and accommodations. We’re of the belief they won’t be out here until Monday at the earliest.”

Adam knit his eyebrows together. “It’s not Monday.”

“You fuckin’ tell me. Anyway, I’m halfway through a meeting with a few UN representatives when Maura has to interrupt. They arrived at the White House, claimed they had a meeting, and just…didn’t leave. Evan Maura couldn’t get through to them, which is the thing that scared me a little.”

“You should have put Calla on it.”

“Believe me, if she were here, I would’ve. But as it was, I had to hurry out the UN members to deal with decidedly more antagonistic foreign relations.”

“Why were they even here?”

“They wanted to discuss the military relationship between our countries-”

“What the hell?”

“Yeah, I don’t know,” she said, waving one hand in dismissal. “Any points they were trying to make went straight out the window when they started pulling out cue cards, to be honest. I might have to call Löfven to smooth things over.”

“Well, there’s never a dull moment,” Adam said fairly. His mother snorted.

“Sure isn’t. Anyway,” she said, glancing at her watch, “it’s now Thanksgiving, so no more meetings for twenty-four hours.”

“It’s Wednesday.”

She pulled a face in dismissal. “We take our patriotism seriously, darlin’. Don’t want our home state gettin’ too mad.”

“Of course.”

Ana checked her watch again. “The turkeys will be on their way to the Willard by now, so we’re not ruining any American traditions today.”

“Wait,” Adam said. “Where?”

She looked at him, her eyes narrowing. “The Willard. They stay there every year.”

“What? No. _ No. _You cannot give the turkeys five-star accommodations with taxpayer dollars. You’ve been doing this every year?!”

“It’s public knowledge, sugar. Every news outlet mentions it.”

“How did I not-” Adam cut off. “There is no way you can do that! They’re turkeys! It’s a waste!”

“It’s precedent, Adam. I’m not sure if there’s anything to be done at this point.”

Adam stood quickly, pacing back and forth, and his mother stood behind him. “It’s a _ blatant _waste of money, I’m shocked we haven’t already been-”

“Hon, every president so far has done the same-”

“Imagine the story if we broke the tradition! Even conservatives would have to applaud your frugality-”

“We can’t play games with tradition, you know they already call us disrespectful-”

“-we can’t be using _ taxpayer money-” _

“-by all means, if you have the time to find lodging for two forty-pound turkeys-”

“Put them in my room!” Adam blurted. His mother stopped short.

“You’re not serious,” she said. “We’re not putting the turkeys for me to pardon in your bedroom.”

“Yes, we are.”

“Adam-”

He shifted his feet, coming to a stop. He lifted himself up to his full height. Debate Captain Adam, six-time Best Delegate Adam, and First Son Adam converged into one. His mother barely looked phased.

“Oh, God,” his mother said. “I can’t listen to another sales pitch.”

“Madame President,” Adam began, “I’d like to echo the sentiments of the forebears before me-”

“Nope,” she said, making double-time back to her desk. “You’re not going to filibuster me.”

“In 2018 alone, at least forty-three articles in the Wall Street Journal accused the sitting administration of wasting tax dollars. This came on the heels of a tax increase for Americans making more than ten million dollars per year and the subsequent pushback from a more conservative electorate in Congress.”

“Fine!” Ana said, her hand falling to the desk with a thump. She brought it back up to her head to massage her temple a moment later. “I’m too tired to hear my own history read back at me. You win.”

He sat back down on the couch, crossing his legs primly. “Perfect,” he said, allowing himself to smile once again.

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100storiesin2020 · 4 years

Text

a Chainsaw in Fox Tower: Chapter 3

Come read on AO3!

***

Renee smoothed her skirt and fiddled with the cross around her neck. She was waiting in the base of Fox Tower because she had been chosen to meet the new striker first. Apparently she was the friendly face on the team, which she still found amusing. She worked very hard to be a good person, but that didn't change the fact that she was far more dangerous than either Dan or Allison. It was always nice to hear that she didn't appear that way at first glance.

She could hear Wymack's booming voice even before the door opened. "Welcome to Fox Tower," he was saying. Coming in the door behind him was one of the strangest looking girls Renee had ever seen. She was tiny, possibly shorter than Andrew, with dark skin and spiky black hair that had clips thrown in seemingly at random. Her jeans looked like they had been bleached, dyed bright yellow, and then patched over with a rainbow of different fabrics. Her shirt was made of the leftover scraps of fabric. Renee smiled; Allison was going to have a fit.

Coach continued to explain that the girl would be rooming with three teammates as they crossed the lobby to where Renee was standing. "This is Renee Walker," he said. "She's going to show you around."

The girl extended her hand for a handshake. "I'm Blue Sargent. It's very nice to meet you."

Getting a friendly teammate was an odd experience for Renee but she certainly wasn't going to complain about it. "It's nice to meet you too, Blue. Welcome to the Foxes."

Wymack grunted, "She's yours now," before turning around to leave the Tower. As he opened the door, he called back to them. "Don't forget to meet at the court at 5 tonight." He didn't wait for a response before leaving.

Renee turned back to Blue. "Would you like a tour first or would you rather settle right in? We can take your stuff up to the room so you can move in before the other two girls get here."

"Moving in first would be great," Blue said. "I've never lived away from home, and I've never had a roommate." She fiddled with a hair clip. "I figure it can't be too much crazier than my crowded house, but it's definitely going to be different."

Renee tried to smile warmly. She really liked this girl and wanted to put her at ease, even though it still felt unnatural at times to be friendly. "Let's go up, then," she agreed. She looked around for a moment, realizing suddenly that Blue was only carrying a backpack. "Do you have more bags you need to grab?"

"Yes, I do. Mr. Gray kept them in the car so I wouldn't have to carry them around. He should be just outside." They started towards the door.

"Who is Mr. Gray?"

"He's my mom's boyfriend," Blue replied, as they left the Tower. "They haven't been dating long, but I think they're getting serious. He's the first real relationship my mom has been in since my dad, actually. He drove me up today because there was no way both me and Gansey would fit our stuff in the trunk of my car, so Gansey is bringing it up for me later today." They rounded the building and could finally see the parking lot. "Oh, that's him by the gray car." Blue chuckled. "He kind of has a theme going on.

Renee looked to where Blue had pointed and her eyes widened. Beside a nondescript gray car was a man in a nondescript gray suit. He looked purposefully unremarkable, like he would prefer nothing more than not being noticed. Renee knew better. It was in his stance, relaxed but ready to pounce. It was in his eyes and the way they tracked every bit of movement. This man was a trained killer. Renee strained to keep her calm, harmless demeanor, feeling his eyes weighing every inch of her to determine whether she was a threat. She reminded herself that this man was Blue's friend, and was probably safe.

"We are going to move in now," Blue told him happily.

Mr. Gray smiled, softening his hard face by a respectable amount. Renee breathed a silent sigh of relief. "Then let's get your things upstairs," he replied. He opened up the trunk and pulled out suitcase after suitcase, and duffel bag after duffel bag. Renee had to laugh then. This was reminding her a little too much of Allison.

They divided up the bags between the three of them and gradually made their way up to the sixth floor. Renee used the walk to tell Blue all about the Tower and what to expect from living with roommates. It had been quite the adjustment at first when none of the girls had gotten along, but nowadays they had it down to a system, and Renee was confident that they would be able to slot in one more person without too much trouble. Blue was hopeful for the same.

Renee pulled out her key ring and opened the door. "Here we are, home sweet home." It was a small living room area with two doors leading out. Through one door was a kitchen, and through the other was a bedroom with two sets of bunk beds. "You can take either the bottom or top bunk, as long as you are on the left side of the bedroom." Renee smoothed her skirt nervously. It had taken her awhile to feel safe sleeping in a room with other people, even though she had had half of the room to herself. Hopefully she was healed enough now that hearing sounds directly above or below herself would not startle her too badly. And Andrew had her knives, so they wouldn't be an issue.

"I'll take the top bunk," Blue said cheerfully. "I've always wanted a lofted bed." She picked through the bags that had been dumped on the living room floor, finally grabbing a tattered blue duffel bag before heading for the bedroom. "Let's get started!"

******

Eventually all was unpacked and Mr. Gray had taken most of the empty bags down to the car, promising to come back with dinner. All that remained was a single duffel bag which had been shoved haphazardly into a drawer. Blue had decorated her bunk and desk, as well as part of the wall on their side of the room. She had asked Renee for permission, and Renee had granted it despite knowing that Allison wouldn't be happy about changing the decorating plan. She quite liked Blue's decor. There were fabric trees on the wall and fairy lights above the bed. Renee assumed that was what they were, anyway. She'd been busy with her own unpacking while Blue had decorated, but she was fairly certain they were not plugged in anywhere, and there wasn't any spot on the wire large enough to hold a battery. A mystery.

Blue had also placed some strange symbols in various out-of-sight places. They went under her mattress, inside a cupboard, folded above a door frame. "My mom and aunts are psychics," she had explained, "and they insisted I bring some protective spells with me when I left the house." She grimaced. "Mom wanted to come put them up herself, but Mr. Gray helped me talk her out of it."

"Why didn't you want her to come?"

"Blue shrugged. "I've been 'the psychic's daughter' all my life, and for once I just want to be Blue Sargent. I know y'all will think I'm strange, and I'm happy with that. I just want to be strange because I am strange, not because my mother is."

Renee thought about that for a moment. "Was it a hard life?" Blue blinked at her. "Being the psychic's daughter, I mean. You don't seem to fit the Fox stereotype, but Wymack wouldn't have recruited you if there wasn't something there."

Blue laughed. "You mean the stereotype of a broken home? I was pretty offended when Coach showed up because of that. I have a good home and a good family. It was difficult to find friends, but I think that would have been true no matter who my mother was." The smile suddenly wiped from Blue's face. "I am broken, though. It's just in a different way."

There wasn't a tactful way to respond to that, but Renee was saved by the door bursting open.

"Hello Renee!" It was Dan, all smiles and confidence as she swept into the room and extended a hand to Blue. "You must be Blue! Welcome to the team! It's nice to have another female face around. We need someone sensible to balance out these boys."

Blue laughed, and Renee could already tell these two would get along nicely. "I'm nothing if not sensible, and it'll be nice to have some female friends. It's just been me and the Raven boys for too long now."

"Raven boys??" Dan and Renee exclaimed in unison.

Blue looked confused but understanding quickly crossed her face. "Not those Ravens!" She looked chagrined. "My friends went to a rival school and their mascot was also the Ravens. So I called them my Raven boys. I think I'm going to figure out a new nickname."

At this point the door opened again. "Hey babe," Matt said. He walked in and gave Dan a big hug. "You must be the new striker. Blue, right?" She nodded and he grinned back at her. "Is that orange monstrosity really your car?"

Blue lit up. "Gansey is here?" Right on cue, somebody knocked on the door extremely politely. "Gansey!!" She threw open the door and leaped into the arms of a brown haired boy several inches taller than her. He spun her around as she laughed, but he froze when he noticed the others in the room. Renee watched as the all-American boy transformed in the blink of an eye, suddenly becoming authoritative and presidential. It seemed to be a trick of the face and posture. It was very effective, and Renee did /not/ like it.

"Hello, I'm Gansey," he said. He approached Dan first and extended his hand to shake hers. "You must be Danielle Wilds, team captain." At least he was polite.

Dan seemed thrown by the formality and respect. "You can call me Dan," she said. "Gansey? That's an unusual name."

He laughed. "It's my surname. I'm Richard Campbell Gansey the Third, and that name is just too much." He moved on to shake Matt's hand and then Renee's. "I'm looking forward to playing with all of you." He turned to Blue. "Are you all unpacked? I could use a hand. Also, here are your keys." He handed over a key ring adorned with two keys and several key chains of varying materials and design.

Blue smiled. "Start bringing things up. I'll be right down." Gansey nodded and left. Renee handed her a key to the dorm, and she added it to the ring.

"So..." Matt began. "Are you two dating?"

"Yup," she replied, popping the p.

"Is he always so..." Dan started.

"Obnoxious? Pretentious? Presidential? Bossy?" Dan laughed at Blue's annoyed expression. "Depends. It took me a bit too long to get past that face." She smiled softly. "It was worth the effort in the end, even if he really pissed me off at first. Anyway, I better go help him." She turned and left the room.

Dan turned to Matt. "What do you think it will take to get Mr. President to thaw out?"

Matt grinned. "My money is on Andrew scaring him half to death."

Dan laughed. "I don't want Andrew to do that, but I think you're right."

"I think he just needs time to trust us," Renee said. "After some practices and movie nights I bet he will warm right up to us."

"Twenty dollars says you're wrong," Dan said.

"I'll match it," said Matt.

Renee smiled, "Consider it a bet."

#all for the game #the foxhole court #a chainsaw in fox tower #crossover #the raven king #the kings men #the raven boys #the dream theives #blue lily lily blue #blue sargent #renee walker

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lavender-reads · 5 years

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“She recognized the strange happiness that came from loving something without knowing why you did, that strange happiness that was sometimes so big that it felt like sadness.”

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

This book already feels like a daydream. Quick and fleeting but something I can’t get out of my everlasting thoughts. (review under cut)

First off, I wanted to mention that I plan on doing singular reviews for each of the books in the Raven Cycle series rather than one collective review of the whole series. If the rest of the series continues to be anything like the first book, I feel like it does more justice to write about the books as I read them. The story takes you in so many different directions that it feels correct to write about them as you discover the mysteries of the series rather than after you know them.

That being said, all I could say when I finished this book was what the fuck. Not to be crude, but I was so absolutely blown away the entire time I was reading this book that I truly had nothing else to say by the end of it other than to question what the hell I had just read. But like, in the absolute best way possible.

The setup of the book introduces you to Blue Sargent, a normal girl whose life and family is anything but normal. Blue is not only the daughter of a psychic, but is completely surrounded by them in her small house at 300 Fox Way. She herself, however, isn’t a psychic but rather enhances their power whenever she is around. Ever since Blue was born, every psychic around her has told her the same simple fact.

Whenever she kisses her true love, she is going to kill him.

This was never really a problem for Blue until she met Gansey. Or rather, Gansey’s spirit.

Because during Saint Mark’s Eve, while out with her aunt to discover the names of those who are going to die within the next twelve months, Blue finally sees a spirit for the first time in her whole life! But spirits only show themselves to non-seers if they are their true love or they caused their death.

I’m sure you can see where this is going.

On the flip side of this story, Gansey, a rich boy attending Aglionby (a prestigious all-boys boarding school) is on a search of his own. He and his eccentric group of friends are looking to discover the secrets behind Henrietta, Virginia. Specifically, he’s looking to learn more about the ley lines that run through the city and their connection to a mystical ancient Welsh king who may still be living after all these years.

If this description doesn’t make any sense to you, welcome to the club. I find it really, really hard to accurately describe this book in an easy way for people to understand and if anyone has a better way to do it, please let me know. Honestly, even the official description for this book doesn’t do it justice. I’ve been likening it back to Twin Peaks, not because of the actual content of the story but in the way the book spins a very normal, realistic group of people and their lives into something magical in ways that just absolutely whips you around every twist and turn. The story holds so much more than what is shown on the cover and every time you think you’ve figured something out you get launched into a whole new situation that creates a whole new solution to a problem you’ve already forgotten you were dealing with.

At one point while reading, I had to stop and text my best friend to tell him that this book made me wish I had one single creative bone in my body because I was so blown away by the writing. The words flow together like a witches spell, poetry that wraps you up in your own little magical world, while still somehow conveying how it feels to be a teenager desperately looking for answers about life and trying to find your own family. The imagery the book uses to pull you in is one thing but the symbolism is on a completely new level. In a book where tarot readings are a very important story element, the use of the story’s own symbolism reminds me very much of reading my own tarot decks and deciphering their meanings. Just little things like Gansey’s Epi-pen sitting in his car or Blue’s face on the Page of Cups. You can tell interest in a character runs deep when you can reference an everyday object and yearn to know the history behind it.

And, let’s be real here, the characters carry this book. Not because the plot is bad but rather because you have to love the characters to get the plot. While the plot takes its twists and turns, you have to understand these characters lives, their feelings, and their motivations. And Stiefvater definitely delivers. I couldn’t help but truly fall in love with every single one of the main characters, from Blue’s need to save everyone, to Gansey’s ability to get lost in what he loves, to Adam’s constant internal battle to be independent, to Ronan’s dealings with grief, to honestly practically everything about Noah. Sure, it’s your stereotypical gang of adventurous teens but there’s something so particularly magical and inviting about this group of teens that it’s one of those where you just can’t help but love all of them.

Truly, though, it’s hard to complain about a book that feels like it was written with all of my tastes in mind. I’ve never been big on fantasy but I love realistic magic and fantasy worlds that mold themselves around real, modern life. I love stories that are so outrageously crazy you don’t know what’s happening 99% of the time until you finally find that 1% and can put the pieces together only to realize that the story you thought you figured out was a different story and you actually don’t know anything at all. I’ve been interested in the paranormal and ley lines my whole life but more than that I love divination and tarot cards and using the future to understand the present. I’m also a sucker for a book with multiple POVs, which I wasn’t even expecting when I picked this book up but I’m so glad it had. This book kind of literally has everything.

I don’t know why this book started popping up in my circles so much recently, but I’m very glad it did. I’m also not sure how I missed this book when it first came out either, but without everyone constantly talking about it around me for some reason I definitely would not have picked it up. I’m very glad I decided to give it a chance while knowing absolutely nothing about it (LOL) and I can’t wait to continue to learn more about these characters and their stories and uncover more of the mystery of Henrietta, Virginia, and the strange, wonderful people who live there.

...

Side note, the last line of this book. I lost my actual mind. Okay, that’s all.

#lavender reviews #trc #the raven cycle #the raven boys #book #books #book review #book reviews #book rec #book recommendations #read #reading #bookworm #bookblr #booklr #booklover

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anxiousanimal · 7 years

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Favorite Adam moments

It’s Adam Parrish’s birthday and since he’s a character that has made me bite my fingernails and yell at the page and grin like an idiot and maybe even get a moist eye or two (this despite being spoiled to his ending), here are some of my favorite Adam moments in (I think) chronological order:

(Note: Some notable fav moments I omitted because I felt they fell more under “Pynch”. I admit the line between the categories can blur a little.)

Adam and his Spongebob ball:

Gansey joined Adam at his safely distant vantage point. In comparison to Ronan, Adam looked clean, self-contained, utterly in control. From somewhere, he had gotten a rubber ball printed with a SpongeBob logo, and he bounced it with a pensive expression.

"I convinced them not to call the cops," Adam said. He was good at making things quiet.(TRB ch7)

This scene is such a deft, innocent way of hinting that this character is going to be Trouble.

Adam sends Blue flowers:

As the woman headed back to her car, Blue turned the arrangement in her hand. It was just a spray of baby’s breath around a white carnation; they smelled prettier than they looked.

Calla commented, "The delivery must’ve cost more than the flowers."

Feeling around the wiry stems, Blue found a little card. Inside, a woman’s scrawl had transcribed a message:

I hope you still want me to call. — Adam

Now the tiny bunch of flowers made sense. They matched Adam’s frayed sweater. (TRB ch19)

Man, I wish I could just include all his scenes with Blue because their whole relationship is such a rollercoaster ride. Blue got to see the best and the worst of Adam Parrish, but I picked this moment because it’s hopelessly adorable.

Adam puts his head in Blue’s lap:

She’d given up and leaned back by the time Adam appeared. He stepped into the dim green shadow of the tree from the house side.

"Persephone said you were out here." He just hung there at the edge of the shadow.

Blue thought about saying I’m so sorry about your dad, but instead she just stretched out a hand toward him. Adam gave an unsteady sigh of the sort that she could see from six feet away. Wordlessly, he sat beside her and then laid his head on her lap, his face in his arms.(TRB ch41)

I’m thinking about the line “Adam had been starving for longer” in TRK. It’s both touching and unsettling how readily he opens up to Blue during TRB. There’s the sexism in seeing a girl as someone you can automatically confide in, but there’s also a boy who’s clearly starved for affection and hasn’t learned proper boundaries yet. In some ways he’s very emotionally mature, in other ways he has miles to go.

Adam vs Declan:

"You’re not going to fight me, are you?" Adam asked, as if he wasn’t nervous. "I thought that was Ronan’s thing, not yours."

It worked better than Adam could have imagined; Declan immediately fell back a step. Reaching into his back pocket, Declan withdrew a folded envelope. Adam recognized the Aglionby crest on the return address.

"He’s getting kicked out," Declan said, stuffing the envelope toward Adam. "Gansey promised me he would turn his grades around. Well, that hasn’t happened. I trusted Gansey, and he let me down. When he gets back, let him know he’s gotten my brother kicked out."

This was more than Adam could stand.

"Oh no," he said. He hoped Ronan was listening. "Ronan did that all by himself. I don’t know when you both are going to see that only Ronan can keep himself in Aglionby. Some day, he has to pick for himself. Until then, you’re both wasting your time." (TRB ch31)

What I love here isn’t just that Adam stands in the way of someone much bigger and stronger than him, that he knows what to say to get Declan to back off, nor that he does all that for Ronan. It’s that he then can’t help but yelling in Declan’s face about his and Gansey’s treatment of Ronan. Adam may be a careful sort, but if you step on his principles, goddammit, he’ll let you hear about it.

Adam and Gansey at the hospital:

This was where Adam always said something. Where he got angry. Where he snapped, No, I won’t take your damn money, Gansey. You can’t buy me. But he just turned that paper bracelet around and around and around.

"You win," Adam said finally. He rubbed a hand through his uneven hair. He sounded tired. "Take me to get my stuff."

Gansey had been about to start the Camaro, but he took his hand away from the ignition. "I didn’t win anything. Do you think this is how I wanted it?"

"Yes," Adam replied. He didn’t look at him. "Yes, I do."

Adam stopped. Climbing in jerkily, he pulled the door shut. He didn’t do it hard enough, so he had to try two more times. They were silent as Gansey pulled back into traffic. Words pressed against his mouth, begged to be said, but he kept silent.

Adam didn’t look at him when he said, finally, "It doesn’t matter how you say it. It’s what you wanted, in the end. All your things in one place, all under your roof. Everything you own right where you can see …"

But then he stopped. He dropped his head into his hands. His thumbs worked through the hair above his ears, over and over, the knuckles white. When he sucked in his breath, it was the ragged sound that came from trying not to cry. (TRB ch38)

God, this scene is so tense and awful and heartbreaking, and the car door that won’t shut just emphasizes the frustration so perfectly. He may have just escaped an abusive home, but it feels more like a defeat than a victory.

Adam picks the Magician:

He said, “I am. I’m — I’m pulling another card.”

He hesitated, waiting for her to tell him it wasn’t allowed. But she just waited. Adam cut the deck, laid his hand on each stack. He took the card that felt warmer.

Flipping it, he placed the card beside the nine of swords.

A robed figure stood before a coin, a goblet, a sword, a wand — all of the symbols of all the tarot suits. An infinity symbol floated above his head; one arm was lifted in a posture of power. Yes, thought Adam. Understanding prickled and then evaded him.

He read the words at the bottom of the card.

The Magician.

Persephone let out a long, long breath and began to laugh. It was a relieved laugh that sounded as if she’d been running.

“Adam,” she said, “finish your pie.” (TDT ch50)

I don’t know if I even need to explain this one. After reaching his lowest low and then being told that his future is bleak, Adam decides that no, screw fate, he’s going to take charge of his own future. It’s such an exhilarating moment and might be my #1 favorite.

Adam relieving Gansey’s anxiety:

“No, it’s not. It’s disgusting of me.” Gansey didn’t open his eyes. “Everything has gotten so ugly. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”

Everything had begun ugly for Adam, but he knew what Gansey meant. His noble and oblivious and optimistic friend was slowly opening his eyes and seeing the world for what it was, and it was filthy, and violent, and profane, and unfair. Adam had always thought that was what he wanted — for Gansey to know. But now he wasn’t sure. Gansey wasn’t like anyone else, and suddenly Adam wasn’t sure that he really wanted him to be.

“Here,” Adam said, standing, fetching their history text. “Do the reading. Out loud. I’ll take notes.”

An hour passed this way, Gansey reading out loud in his lovely old voice, and Adam jotting in his overambitious hand, and when Gansey reached the end of the assignment, he closed the text carefully and set it on the upside-down plastic bin Adam used as a bedside table. (BLLB ch12)

I think this is such an Adam Parrish way of taking care of his friends. While he can often be harsh and hard, when Adam does reach out to help, it tends to be in a way that is tailored to the person in question. Here he can see Gansey’s facade unraveling and so he asks Gansey to read aloud under the pretext of helping Adam with his homework, something that soothes Gansey and leaves his dignity intact. See also: soothing Ronan after Whelk almost shot Gansey.

Adam gives Opal his watch:

As Gansey circled the tree, trying to look useful if nothing else, he saw Adam crouch in front of the hooved orphan girl. She continued staring past him as he unbuckled his cheap watch. He tapped the top of her hand, lightly, just so that she marked that he was offering the watch to her. Gansey expected her to ignore him or to reject the gift like she had Aurora’s rose, but the girl accepted it without hesitation. She began to wind it with intense concentration as Adam remained crouched before her for a moment longer, eyebrows knitted. (TRK ch8)

Another example of tailored caring, although of course, in this case it ties to very personal memories of Adam’s. Either way, it’s one of the best moments in the books.

Adam scries into headlights:

He spotted it, the headlights still on, engine off. Adam was crouched in front of it, staring unflinchingly into the headlights’ brilliance. His fingers were spread on the asphalt and his feet braced like a runner waiting for the starting shot. Three tarot cards splayed before him. He’d taken one of the floor mats out of the car to crouch on to keep from dirtying his uniform trousers. If you combined these two things – the unfathomable and the practical – you were most of the way to understanding Adam Parrish. (TRK ch18)

This is just a very Adam thing to do.

Adam sets out to find a demon, ends up back at the trailer:

The dust cleared and Adam finally saw where he had brought them.

He sighed. (TRK ch19)

I love that twist. He’s come so far at this point, but here’s this nasty little reminder that some things you don’t escape easily. Instead of letting it get him down, though, Adam lets it motivate him to save someone else.

Adam saves Ronan and Opal:

This was what had saved them from drowning. They had been lifted by the branches. Adam crouched on the other side of the pool, head dropped low like he was about to sprint or pray, his hands pressed to the rock on either side of him, knuckles white. He had placed a few small stones between his hands in a pattern that must have made sense to him. One of the still growing tendrils had tangled around his ankles and his wrists. The proper truth struck Ronan: The plants had not saved their lives. Adam Parrish had saved their lives. (TRK ch23)

Adam forced a demon-possessed magical forest to do his bidding. I thought covering them with leaves to protect them from the acid was a nice touch. .

Adam goes back to the trailer in the TRK epilogue:

He felt a sudden urge to save all these other Adams hidden in plain view, though he didn’t know if they would listen to him. It struck him as a Gansey or a Blue impulse, and as he held that tiny, heroic spark in his mind, he realized that it was only because he believed that he had saved himself that he could imagine saving someone else. (TRK epilogue)

Of course this had to be here. Not much explanation needed, but I do like that though Adam didn’t exactly happily wrap things up with his parents, that wasn’t the point. We see that he will be fine, he’s in a good place mentally, he and Ronan are going strong, he thinks of Gansey and Blue in admiring terms, he’s heading off to college and he wants to rescue kids like him in the future. We just know he’s headed for great things and that it’s all well-deserved. Such a perfect way of wrapping up his arc.

#adam parrish #ronan lynch #gansey #richard gansey #richard gansey III #blue sargent #persephone poldma #trc #the raven cycle #trk spoilers

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actuallymollyweasley · 7 years

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kids of the in-between: ch. 14

aka “Ticking Backwards”

Honestly, you’re all amazing for being so patient all this time, and I hope this chapter was worth the wait! Managed to finish just in time to celebrate the end of the beauty that was Pynch Week haha. Feel free to ask to be tagged in future updates if you want!

Read all parts: on tumblr | on ao3

One second, Adam was highlighting his calculus lecture notes from last week in an effort to try and remember how the hell he was supposed to answer the questions in his problem set. The next second, Blue Sargent had somehow managed to snatch up his notebook and highlighter, toss them onto his bed, and perch herself on his desk, all in a single motion. She then proceeded to smile at him as if this was completely normal.

(Although Adam supposed that because Blue Sargent was involved, it kind of was.)

“Hello, Adam.”

Adam narrowed his eyes. She was using her customer-service voice, the one that managed to convey I'm running on two hours of sleep so you can be polite to me or die just by the way she shaped her vowels. “Blue. What do you want?”

“Can’t I just want to talk to my best friend, whom I love dearly and never see anymore?”

“You can,” Adam said. “But you generally do that from your own desk, not mine. Also, it's not my fault that you've only slept in your own bed three times in the last week.”

“Adam!”

Blush was an interesting color on Blue. It clashed rather horribly with the neon green streak Noah had dyed in her hair the other day—but the neon green streak also clashed horribly with her ripped purple overalls, so maybe it all balanced out in the end.

“I'm just saying,” Adam continued, “don't try to pass all the blame off on my double shift and weird boyfriend.”

To his surprise, that statement made Blue eye him carefully. “That's what I wanted to talk to you about, actually.”

“The double shift?”

“The weird boyfriend, you idiot.”

“Could have gone either way,” Adam argued, although he couldn't quite keep the corners of his mouth from twitching. “What about him?”

Blue snagged one of his pens and started doodling on her overalls, as if owning ripped purple overalls wasn't anti-establishment enough already. “How are things going between you two? Since your… since that phone call?”

“They're good,” Adam said, and was surprised to find that for once in his life, he actually meant it. Good wasn't something he came across very often.

Blue drew a suspicious smiley face on her overalls. It sported a single raised eyebrow and a curled mouth and a judgmental stare that pointed directly at Adam. “So no problems at all?”

“I said good, not perfect.”

After all, Ronan had blown into this very dorm room yesterday morning to show Adam a caricatured painting of Gansey that he'd created using Gansey's sleeping face as a model. Adam had been working at his desk with his deaf ear pointed toward the door and all his focus directed toward his assignments. When Ronan had let the door slam shut behind the tail end of his hurricane, Adam had flinched. It had been instinctive, and unavoidable, and had nothing to do with Ronan himself, and he had still freaked out and left and refused to talk to Adam for the next several hours out of misplaced guilt.

So they were working on it.

But that was good too. It was nice to work for something that Adam actually thought he could get.

“There's already too much perfect in our friend group,” he continued. “Henry and Noah never even frown at each other, and don't think I didn't notice that Gansey’s wearing a lavender polo shirt today.”

“Coincidence,” Blue insisted.

“You guys matched outfits,” Adam replied, unrepentant. “Ronan and I have to have disagreements just to balance out the rest of you.”

“That's a terrible reason to have a fight.”

“You yell at Gansey for wearing boat shoes every day just to keep up your three-week streak.”

“This conversation isn't about me and Gansey.”

“The thing about a conversation,” Adam said, “is that you shouldn't start one if you don't want it to go both ways. Why are you suddenly asking about Ronan?”

At that, Blue finally looked up from the drawings on her overalls, rolling Adam’s pen between her palm and the desk. “I just… Are you sure you want to stay here for Thanksgiving instead of coming home with me? Because I know that you don't want to cause issues with money, but you know my mom always cooks too much food anyway, and you really wouldn't be imposing and my baby cousins would love to see you and I don't want you to have Thanksgiving with Ronan just because you don't think you have any other options.”

“Oh, Blue.” Adam reached out, rolled the pen out from under Blue’s hand, and started drawing. “I'm staying here for a lot of reasons. One reason is that I don't want to go back to Henrietta so soon after telling my father that I don't need to.”

“But Adam,” Blue protested, “you shouldn't—”

“Another,” Adam continued pointedly, “is that Calla always looks at me like I'm either going to destroy the house or fall down dead at any moment, just because she knows I notice when she's doing it. Also, your mom always burns the turkey, and Ronan has never actually burned anything that he's cooked in front of me. Not to mention that I genuinely like Ronan and am looking forward to making out with him over break. I'm pretty sure all of those are valid reasons. Do you disagree?”

Blue looked at him, blinked, looked down at the vines now twisting across the hem of her overalls, and sighed. “No. I just had to make sure I didn't need to beat Ronan up for you. And I was hoping I could convince you to come so I wouldn't have to suffer through my mom’s burnt turkey alone.”

“And the truth comes out,” Adam grinned, capping his pen. “Don’t worry about it, Blue. I'm sure Orla will show up with her husband for Thanksgiving dinner so she doesn't have to cook anything herself, and if Orla enjoys doing anything with you, it’s painting nails and complaining.”

“You got me there,” Blue said, then paused. “You realize that I'm never going to be able to wash these overalls now, right? These drawings are a symbol of our friendship and ability to have serious conversations without deflecting. I have to preserve them forever.”

“All I did was make squiggly lines,” Adam said. “If you really want something worth preserving, hand them to Ronan and give him a Sharpie.”

“He'd just write the lyrics to the Murder Squash Song across my ass.”

“Or he'd draw something really thoughtful on your front pocket and pretend Chainsaw did it.”

Blue considered that statement. “Knowing Ronan, he'd do both.” She clapped both hands on his shoulders—a distinctly Gansey gesture—and looked him in the eye. “He really is perfect for you.”

Then she hopped off his desk.

“Did you just… give me your blessing?”

“I have no idea what you're talking about.”

“Isn't that Gansey’s job? Are you assigning each other parental duties now?”

“Sorry, gotta go, meeting Henry to tear holes in our clothes and drink tea from his expensive mugs.”

“Henry would never defile his vintage Madonna t-shirts and designer jeans.”

“My and Noah’s clothes,” Blue corrected. “Have fun with your calculus.”

Blue had been his best friend for over three years at this point. Adam didn't know why he kept making the mistake of attempting to understand her.

“Now, I restocked the coffee beans and cereal—and remembered to buy milk this time, before you ask,” Gansey said, glancing around the kitchen like the cabinets would help remind him of what he wanted to say. “Ronan said you two were fine to do the grocery shopping on your own, but I didn’t know if you would get a chance to go out before breakfast tomorrow so I wanted to make sure you didn’t have to worry about that. The lock on our door is still broken, so you might want to push the couch in front of it at night just in case. Declan and Matthew are welcome to stay in my room if they don’t want to book a hotel. I’m planning to return Sunday afternoon around four, but if anything happens before then, just give me a call and I can be back in three hours. In fact, if you think I might need to be here for any reason at all, say the word and I can cancel my plans. Maybe I should just call Helen right now and tell her to let Mom know that I can’t make it home for Thanksgiving after all. I’m sure she’d underst—”

“Gansey.” Adam had been planning to let Gansey tire himself out, but this was getting out of hand. “I have been self-sufficient for the last ten years. I'm pretty sure I can handle a week in the dorms, even if that week does involve Ronan.”

“Dickface,” Ronan called out from inside his room.

“Are you talking to me or Gansey?”

“Yes,” Ronan said.

Gansey’s face contorted like he wasn't sure whether to feel offended or amused. “Regardless. You'll call me if the need arises, won't you?”

“Yes, Gansey, we'll call you.” Adam pushed at Gansey's rolling suitcase with his toe, watching with satisfaction as it bounced off the kitchen cabinets and slowly rolled back. “Now go enjoy your Thanksgiving.”

“You too.” Gansey considered Adam for a moment and then held out one hand for a fistbump. It was absurd and boyish and brilliantly Gansey, and Adam accepted it with a smile tugging at his lips.

Gansey's responding grin was blinding as he reached down and grabbed the handle of his suitcase. “Ronan, I'm leaving!”

“Good fucking riddance!” Ronan replied before sticking his head out of the doorway. “Watch your shifts into second gear. That's when the Pig stalls out most often.”

Adam wouldn't have thought it possible, but Gansey's smile widened. “Thanks, Lynch,” he said, and then he was gone, and Adam and Ronan were alone.

Adam turned and raised his eyebrows at Ronan, who very purposefully turned around and retreated back into his room. Unfazed, Adam followed him. “Second gear, huh?”

“You're the mechanic,” Ronan said. “Didn't you notice?”

“Oh, I noticed,” Adam said, “but I wasn't the one who made sure that Gansey knew too.”

“Shut up,” Ronan said, and kissed him.

They'd been dating for a few weeks now, but kissing Ronan Lynch still felt like starting a wildfire. Adam had to break away before they burned down the whole dorm.

As he did, he eyed the extra sheets draped across half of Ronan's room. “When are you going to let me see what's under those?”

“When I’m fucking done with it.”

He frowned. “‘It?’ Is all of that for one art piece?”

Ronan shrugged. “Dr. Azalea.”

“But I thought you already turned in your last assignment.”

“This,” Ronan gestured vaguely, “is for my first assignment.”

Adam felt his heart collide against his ribs, a bang rather than a thump. “Happiness?”

“Yeah.” Ronan tugged the sheets more securely over his stack of canvases. “It's stupid.”

“It's not.” Adam reached out and took one of Ronan's hands in both of his, rubbing his thumbs over Ronan's knuckles. “Now come on, what are we supposed to be buying for tomorrow?”

“This was a terrible idea.” Ronan looked about five seconds away from throwing the pasta he was cooking out the window. “Adam, why the fuck did you let me cook? We should have met them for lunch somewhere. I shouldn't have let them come here in the first place. We should have driven to D.C. We should have stayed here by ourselves. Fuck, this dish is shit.”

Adam peered over Ronan’s shoulder. “Doesn't look like shit to me.” He snagged a bite of penne with a fork before Ronan could stop him. “Doesn't taste like it either.”

“It’s shit compared to my mom’s,” Ronan said, and that was startling enough to make Adam turn off the stove and take the spatula from Ronan’s slightly shaking hands. He hadn't heard Ronan mention his mother since before his father had died. Actually, he'd never heard Ronan mention his mother at all.

“Ronan.” Adam frowned at his boyfriend’s hands, trying to find the right words. He'd never been particularly skilled at offering comfort. He'd never really needed to be. “It doesn't have to taste like your mom’s to be good. I'm sure they'll love it.”

“Matthew might,” Ronan muttered. “Declan’s going to hate it.”

“He won't,” Adam insisted, but the look on Ronan's face told Adam he knew that Adam had no idea what he was talking about. He was an only child, his parents were both alive and terrible, and he had never met Declan Lynch before in his life.

“I mean it,” Adam said, not sure how he would back up that statement, and then there was a knock at the door.

Ronan tensed, gave the pasta one last stir, opened the door—and was promptly tackled by a medium-sized bundle of brightly colored clothing and hair like sunshine.

“Ronan! I've missed you so much! Your hair is so short! How is college?”

It's mostly like high school,” Ronan said, voice a little rough, “but with better friends. Are you still growing?”

“Like a weed,” came from behind Matthew’s mass of curls. “If you don't watch out, he’ll end up taller than you, Ronan.”

“Doubtful,” Ronan said, shoulders stiff but eyes still soft because Matthew had stuck his tongue out at him in response. “Are you coming inside for lunch or what?”

“Or what,” Matthew replied, although he was already passing Ronan in the doorway.

Adam hid a smile in his shirt collar.

At the same moment, Matthew caught sight of him and bounded forward like a wayward basketball, only skidding to a halt to extremely vigorously shake Adam’s hand. “Hi! I'm Matthew, Ronan’s brother. It's great to meet you! What’s your name?”

Adam’s smile froze onto his face. Had Ronan seriously not told them—

“Hello, I’m Declan Lynch, and you must be Adam Parrish.” Ronan's older brother slipped past Matthew to introduce himself. He had Ronan’s sharp cheekbones, the type of suit that a millionaire would wear for a casual evening out on his own personal yacht, and a handshake with half of Matthew's enthusiasm and twice his firmness. “Matthew, don't you retain anything Ronan says?”

“I retain the things that matter, like that he said lunch was ready,” Matthew retorted. Then he glanced at Adam. “Um, not that you don't matter, obviously. I just forgot that you were going to be here the whole time. But now I'm even more excited to meet you! Ronan’s never had a boyfriend before.”

The Lynch in question was currently glaring at the pot on the stove—probably because he couldn't bring himself to glare directly at Matthew, Adam thought with amusement. “Shut up,” Ronan said, “and grab a plate.”

“I'll shut up if you let me drink beer with lunch,” Matthew said.

“Not a fucking chance,” Ronan replied.

Adam had no way of proving it. But when he turned around to shut the front door, he was pretty sure he glimpsed a small smile on Declan’s face.

The rest of Wednesday went so well that Adam had to refrain three times from asking Ronan what he'd been so worried about. As he’d expected, Matthew had nothing but compliments to bestow on the food Ronan made, and Declan didn't mention it at all, which Ronan claimed was its own kind of silent approval. After that, they spent most of the afternoon shopping for last-minute groceries—or rather, Ronan and Declan argued about what they needed to buy while Matthew stealthily added cans of whipped cream to the shopping cart behind their backs. By the time they reached the checkout line, there were at least fifteen cans tucked between the bags of sweet potatoes and fresh green beans, but the older Lynch brothers placed each new can on the conveyor belt without a word.

Declan made dinner and spent most of the meal talking about his job.

Matthew begged Ronan for beer unsuccessfully half a dozen times.

Ronan painted all through the night, telling Adam that with a little luck, he could be finished by the end of Thanksgiving break.

And then Thursday morning came.

Adam woke up to yelling, which was both familiar and discomfiting. For a moment, he couldn’t distinguish reality from his dream about the double-wide trailer he’d grown up in. The sheets felt scratchier. The room felt smaller. He even thought he heard the sound of breaking glass.

But then Declan shouted, “And it’d be nice if you’d answer your phone every once in a while,” the polar opposite of anything Robert Parrish would have said to his son, and Adam refocused.

“It’s college,” Ronan snapped. “I’m fucking busy.”

“Oh, please, you’re an art student.” Declan’s voice was scathing. “Don’t bother pretending that you’re drowning under some heavy workload.”

Adam decided to grab a pair of sweatpants and open the door before somebody got punched.

“Good morning,” he said pleasantly, doing his best to pretend that the walls weren’t paper-thin. “You’re up earlier than usual, Ronan.”

“Didn’t sleep,” Ronan growled, which Adam already knew. “I was working on an assignment for class.”

“And I’m sure it’s very pretty,” the eldest Lynch brother said. Ronan was still silently fuming behind the kitchen counter, but Declan’s expression had shifted from derisive to politely neutral the moment he caught sight of Adam. “Good morning, Adam. Would you like some coffee?”

“I’d love some,” Adam said.

“Sugar? Cream?”

“Just a little cream is fine, thanks.”

“Gross,” Ronan muttered.

“You’re gross,” Matthew said over a yawn, wandering into the hallway. “What are we talking about?”

“Coffee,” Ronan said.

“Oh, yeah. That is gross.”

Adam furrowed his eyebrows. “I thought you two were staying in a hotel room?”

(It was the type of decision he had a feeling he would never understand—in his opinion, spending money on a hotel when there was a perfectly usable bed and couch in the suite was a frivolity and a waste. But Declan had thought a hotel room would be more comfortable, and so the money was spent.)

Matthew rubbed a hand across his eyes, yawning again. “We did.”

“But Matthew said he was going to use the restroom and ‘accidentally’ went back to sleep on your friend Gansey’s bed,” Declan explained.

“Lame,” Ronan said. But this time he reached out and ruffled Matthew’s hair, so Adam figured things would be all right.

Less than an hour later, the Lynch brothers were arguing again.

“What do you think you're doing?” Declan demanded.

“Making the spice rub for the fucking turkey, like I said I was going to,” Ronan growled.

“With those spices? You're doing it completely wrong.”

“No, I'm fucking not.”

“It doesn't need sage.”

“Yes, it does.”

“How would you even know?”

“Because I actually cared about helping Mom out with Thanksgiving dinner, unlike you, and I listened when she was teaching me! It's parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme, like in that fucking song, but without the parsley because who the fuck needs parsley anyway. And then if you’re not a fucking idiot, you’ll remember that it also uses salt, pepper, and garlic powder. That's what she told me.”

“Yeah? Then I'm sure she would have loved to hear you repeat it back like that.”

“Guys,” Matthew whined.

Ronan turned to him. “Matthew, you always hung around the kitchen at Thanksgiving too. Tell Declan that he's wrong.”

Matthew bit his lip, eyes darting between the two of them, and said, “I'm sorry. I don't remember how Mom made it.”

Declan and Ronan both froze for such a long moment that Adam inexplicably remembered the drawing he’d seen on Ronan’s wall the first time he ever entered his room—Declan and Matthew wrestling in the grass, Ronan perched on Niall’s back, and Aurora Lynch smiling softly in the background.

Which was worse? To have never felt the kind of love that the Lynches offered each other, or to grow up surrounded by that love, only to have it all ripped away in a single bloody morning?

Declan sighed. “Maybe it has been too long since I helped Mom in the kitchen,” he said. “Go ahead and do what you want, Ronan.”

Ronan’s knuckles were white as he gripped the edges of the mixing bowl. “Who even fucking cares about the turkey anymore?”

“I do!” The turkey was lying on the other end of the counter, so Matthew nudged it within Ronan’s reach. “Come on, Ro, I’ll help you with the turkey.”

“I can start peeling potatoes,” Adam offered.

Declan stiffened like he had forgotten Adam was there. But when he turned to face him, his smile looked unshakable. It would have been enough to make Adam question whether Ronan and Declan were actually related, except that they shared too many facial features. “That’d be great, Adam,” he said, as if tension wasn’t stretched between everyone in the room like bungee cords just waiting to snap. “But I don’t want you to feel like we have a monopoly on tonight’s menu. Do you have any family recipes you want to make?”

Adam flinched—but a quick look at the rigid lines of Ronan’s back told him that one family’s worth of drama was enough for this Thanksgiving, so he covered it by pulling the bag of potatoes closer to him. “No,” he said simply. “My parents never cared much for Thanksgiving.”

Ronan snorted, and not kindly. “You can say that again.”

Matthew looked between his siblings and Adam, frowning. “So. What are we doing for lunch?”

Lunch was an argument, as Ronan thought they would be too full to eat dinner and Declan thought he was just trying to be difficult. Cooking was an argument, as they were constantly bumping shoulders and using each other's mixing spoons and changing the oven temperature. Chainsaw flew into the kitchen at one point, looking for scraps, and that sparked yet another argument, as Declan couldn't decide which was more horrifying: that Ronan had broken the dorm’s rules to get a pet, that said pet was a raven, or that Ronan was planning on feeding her some of the leftover turkey later.

When the Lynch brothers got along, it made this too-large-for-a-couple-of-college-freshmen dorm feel like a home.

When they were fighting, it made this too-small-for-a-couple-of-angry-boys dorm feel like a certain double-wide trailer that Adam was still trying to put behind him.

And on top of that, he was developing a migraine—because everything sounded louder when you could only hear out of one ear.

So when Matthew went digging through their grocery bags, surfacing only to exclaim that they had forgotten to buy pumpkin pie filling, Adam jumped at the chance to get out of Walton.

“I think there are a few grocery stores just off-campus that are still open on Thanksgiving,” he said. “I can bike around and see if any of them carry pumpkin pie filling.”

“Oh, we couldn't ask that of you,” Declan said.

“It's really not a problem,” Adam replied. “Besides, I want pumpkin pie just as much as Matthew does.”

“Don't be stupid,” Ronan said. Then, when Adam turned to frown at him, “It’s fucking freezing outside.” And he tossed the keys to the BMW at Adam.

Adam caught them out of reflex and sheer luck, furrowing his eyebrows. If he'd been having a shitty day, how much shittier had Ronan been feeling? He’d spent the entire day arguing with the only family he had left. “Ronan,” he started, and then hesitated, not wanting to offend Declan. In the end, he settled on, “Do you want to come with me?”

Ronan just shoved his hands in his pockets. “Nah,” he said. “Gotta keep an eye on the turkey.”

Adam frowned at him again, but when Ronan didn't budge, he had no choice but to leave.

Buying pumpkin pie filling on Thanksgiving afternoon took Adam almost an hour. It turned out to be more difficult to find an open store than he'd anticipated, and if he'd lingered in the one store he had found, walking through every aisle and relishing that it was quiet enough for him to hear the buzz of the fluorescent lights… well, no one could prove it.

In any case, by the time he returned, Ronan was no longer in the kitchen. Instead, his awful electronic music was blaring inside his room.

“The turkey finished cooking, so Ronan decided to let us make the rest of dinner while he went back to painting.” Declan didn't roll his eyes, but with that tone of voice, he didn't need to.

“Well,” Adam replied, “he’s extremely dedicated to his art. He wants everything he works on to be perfect. That's what makes him such a good artist.”

Declan looked like he couldn't imagine Ronan Lynch being dedicated to anything. “Good for him,” he said, sounding unconvinced. “Were you able to find the pumpkin filling, then?”

Adam nodded.

“Awesome!” Matthew sprang up from where he'd been lounging on the couch. “Do you want to help me make the pie, Adam?”

What Adam really thought he should do was check on Ronan. But Matthew’s eyes were shining with excitement, and Adam found himself unable to refuse.

Between making pie, throwing together a few side dishes, and reheating the turkey once everything else had finished baking, hours passed without Adam noticing. Suddenly it was seven o’clock, and dinner was ready.

“We usually try to eat by five,” Declan said, sliding into his chair at the kitchen table, “but with putting everything together ourselves, I suppose delays were inevitable. I hope you don't mind, Adam.”

Adam thought Declan must not have actually gone to college to believe that a seven o’clock dinner was some horrible catastrophe. “It's fine,” he assured him. “Should I go get Ro—?”

“RONAN!” Matthew shouted out of nowhere, making Adam jump. “DINNER!”

“He's fifteen feet away, not five hundred,” Declan chided, although even he seemed unable to properly discipline Matthew. “I’m pretty sure you didn't have to scream that loudly in order for him to hear you.”

“Yeah, but it was fun,” Matthew grinned. “And apparently necessary, because he's STILL NOT OUT HERE!”

A pause.

“RONAN?!”

“I'm coming, I'm coming, Jesus,” Ronan said, shrugging on his leather jacket as he came out of his room. “I had to finish the thing I was working on, calm the fuck down.”

“We were all waiting for you,” Matthew said, in a supercilious tone he could only keep up for half the sentence before breaking into giggles, but Adam’s eyes narrowed as he took a second look at Ronan’s hands.

Declan followed his line of sight and frowned. “Ronan… Ronan, are those bandages? Are you all right?”

“Calm the fuck down,” Ronan repeated. “My hands slipped, it's not a big fucking deal.”

Declan’s frown only deepened. “You cut yourself… on art supplies?”

“Ever heard of a palette knife?” Ronan said, scathing.

“Nope!” Matthew broke in cheerfully. “Now come on, Ronan, sit down, we have to pray.”

Ronan's shoulders stiffened. “Right.” He sat down next to Adam. “I guess that's your job now, Declan?”

For the first time since Adam had met him, Declan looked visibly uncomfortable. “Actually, I was thinking we could all say it together?”

Ronan clasped his hands together so tightly, Adam thought it must be hurting the cuts on his palms. “Fine.”

He bowed his head, and after a moment, Matthew and Declan followed suit. “Bless us, O Lord, and these, thy gifts, which we are about to receive, from thy bounty, through Christ Our Lord. Amen.”

“Amen,” Adam said along with them, although he wasn't sure he believed in gifts or bounty, let alone a benevolent God who supposedly offered them. It just seemed like the polite thing to do.

When they were done, Matthew's head popped back up like a puppy's. “Okay! Let's eat!”

Declan smiled, passed Matthew the mashed potatoes, and stood up to begin cutting into the turkey. Adam got so caught up in filling his plate with green beans and sweet potato casserole and stuffing and peas and turkey and gravy and cranberry sauce—he may have been getting three meals a day from the dining hall, but putting as much food on his plate as he could, whenever he could, was second-nature by now—that he didn't look over at Ronan until he'd sampled everything in reach.

“Ronan,” Adam said, “this turkey is amazing. Whenever I go to Thanksgiving at Blue’s house, her mom always burns it and makes us eat it anyway, but I… Ronan, why is your plate empty?”

Ronan was staring off at nothing.

“Yeah, Ronan, if you don't get some food soon, I'm finishing off the sweet potato casserole without you.”

No, not nothing—the empty chair at the head of the table.

Adam started to get a hard feeling in the pit of his stomach.

“Ronan?”

Ronan stood abruptly and nearly knocked his chair over. “I need a drink,” he said before heading toward the refrigerator.

“A drink,” Declan said drily.

Ronan threw open the refrigerator door.

“Are you serious? Beer on Thanksgiving?”

He grabbed one, seemingly at random, and slammed it on the counter. “Yeah, Declan, beer on fucking Thanksgiving. Who's gonna stop me?”

“I—”

“No, I mean it,” Ronan said. “Who's gonna stop me? Because Mom hasn't spoken in months, Dad’s dead, and I don't have to listen to a word you say. You're not our fucking parents.”

Declan went completely still, as if this was another one of Ronan's paintings. Adam thought he knew which emotion Dr. Azalea would accept this one for. Heartbreak.

“Shit,” Ronan said, “I’m sorry.”

The door slammed shut behind him when he left.

For a moment, silence.

Then, “Ronan, wait!”

Matthew scooted out of his chair and hurried after him.

Adam got up and ran to Ronan's room, intending to use his window to see if Ronan headed into the parking lot, but when he finally tugged Ronan's door open, he couldn't do anything but stare.

At last, the sheets Ronan had been using to hide his happiness assignment had been tossed aside, leaving the project in full view.

It was a wreck.

Adam thought Ronan had actually been proud of how his artwork was turning out, but that was clearly no longer the case. Several of the canvases had been slashed through, while others looked like they had been kicked in. A paint tube had been squeezed out over a few more, leaving behind red paint hardened and flaking to the touch like dried blood. Preliminary sketches had been torn up and scattered over the mess, perverted confetti celebrating creative disaster. And when Adam finally remembered to lean out and look for Ronan, all he noticed was another pile of Ronan's ruined paintings that he’d apparently thrown out of the window. Everything was just—

“What the fuck is this?”

“It’s his art,” Adam said. “He's been working on these canvases for weeks, insisting that he was getting close to finishing, insisting that his next idea was going to be the right one, and now it's all destroyed.”

But when he turned around, Declan wasn't staring at the ruined paintings. He was staring at the objects that Adam had gotten used to after spending so much time in Ronan's room.

“What?” Adam asked. “You can't tell me you don't know about Ronan's dreams.”

“Of course I know about his dreams,” Declan snapped, his eyes too wide and horrified to make his harsh tone effective. “But these are…”

Adam looked around and tried to remember how it had felt to see Ronan's room for the first time. The unnaturally bent sword, the twisted clock that ticked backwards, the dark stain on his floor that was now mostly hidden by ripped canvases and red paint…. That pit in his stomach came back. He'd known the objects weren't exactly fun dream souvenirs, known they could even look menacing, but they were just dispersed among the other objects, right? Tucked between self-bouncing balls and clocks that worked properly, hidden behind dream lights and whimsical inventions? Everyone had nightmares sometimes, and anyway, Adam hadn't seen Ronan dream up anything bad since that night at the campground. Of course, he hadn't been around Ronan every night—but he'd been around sometimes—and Ronan had never objected when Adam asked to spend the night, he'd never said that there was anything to be worried about—but then he was always the one who woke up first, and last night he had never fallen asleep at all.

“This isn't normal,” Adam said. It wasn't a question because he already knew the answer.

He knew it wasn't normal.

But Ronan had been so happy for the last few weeks—he’d thought Ronan had been so happy—that he'd stopped worrying.

Adam felt, abruptly, like a terrible boyfriend.

“No, it’s not normal,” Declan said derisively. “None of this is fucking normal. I haven’t seen him dream like this since…”

“Since Kavinsky?” Adam guessed.

“How do you know about Kavinsky?”

For some reason, the question snapped Adam into action. “This may surprise you,” he said, “but being in a relationship occasionally requires communication.” Except, apparently, when you destroy weeks’ worth of hard work. No, that’s not worth mentioning at all. Adam pushed the thought out of his mind. “Listen, Declan, I still have Ronan’s keys. That means he can’t have gotten that far. You should take your car and look around off-campus. He likes to go to St. Agnes or Nino’s, but check liquor stores too. I’ll search his usual on-campus hideouts because you can’t exactly find those on Google Maps.”

Just then, someone started banging on the front door. For one hopeful moment, Adam thought Ronan might have changed his mind about storming out. But when he flung the door open, only Matthew was waiting on the other side, red-faced and breathless.

“I tried to run after him, but by the time I went into the hallway, he was already gone. I went down the stairs and looked around, but I couldn’t—I couldn’t figure out which direction he’d taken.”

“That’s okay, Matthew,” Adam said. “We’re going to find him. You stay here in case he comes back, all right? Do you have my phone number?”

Matthew shook his head, so Adam took Matthew’s phone out of his hand and punched his number into his contacts, sending himself a text so he would have Matthew’s number as well. Then he did the same to Declan’s phone, grabbed his coat off the couch, and felt in his pockets to make sure Ronan hadn’t taken his keys without Adam noticing after all. They were there, a cool and hard and reassuring weight.

In the same time span, Declan had barely managed to put on one shoe. “You seem to have this search-team business down to a science. Have you… has something like this happened before?”

Adam felt something shatter inside of him. “Not in a while,” he managed to say.

Then he was gone.

Adam checked everywhere. Every classroom Ronan had bribed or broken his way into, every tree he’d sketched, every bench he’d fallen asleep on. By the time he got back to Walton, it was almost nine, Thanksgiving dinner was a forgotten feast weighing down the kitchen table, and nobody had been able to find Ronan Lynch.

Finally, feeling guilty and desperate, Adam called Gansey.

“Adam! I’m so happy to hear from you! I hope you’re having a lovely Thanksgiving. I’m just,” he hiccupped, “watching Food Network with Helen. Because obviously we haven’t seen enough—hic—food for one day.”

Gansey sounded sleepy, wine-drunk, and content. Adam could picture him leaning against Helen on an extravagantly luxurious couch in their living room, even though he had yet to actually see a photograph of Gansey’s sister. It made him feel even worse about saying, “Ronan is missing again.”

Gansey caught himself mid-laugh. “What? But I thought—”

“I don’t think it’s anything serious,” Adam was quick to add. “I mean… you know. Now that we know the truth about that one time. But he left during dinner and Declan and I have checked all the usual places and I….” He sighed. “I would just feel better if I knew where he was.”

Gansey was quiet for a while. “Did he take his car?”

“No.”

More silence. “Did you check the roof?”

Adam felt his heart stop, restart, and stutter again, all in the space of a moment. “The roof?! Gansey, I thought we just established that Ronan wasn’t—”

“Not like that!” Gansey interrupted hastily. “Ronan and I used to go up to the roof to talk. We haven’t been up since… but anyway, it’s worth a shot.”

Adam’s heart did its best to reestablish a natural rhythm. He didn’t think it was particularly successful. “Oh. Okay. Thanks, Gansey.”

“Do you need me to come up? I wasn’t being flippant, you know, when I said I would the other day. If you’re concerned that Ronan might—”

“No!” Adam’s voice was too loud for the near-empty campus. “No, Gansey, you really don’t need to come. You’ve already been helpful enough.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.” Adam hesitated, squeezed his eyes shut, and opened them again. “I’m sorry for calling you like this. Don’t worry, all right? Ronan is fine. This isn’t like before.”

“Just text me when you find him, okay?”

Gansey’s voice was smooth, measured, and nowhere near immature enough to belong to an eighteen-year-old boy.

Adam tried not to let the guilt crush him like a cartoon anvil when he said, “Of course I will, Gansey. Have a nice night.”

After a moment’s indecision, Adam ducked into Ronan and Gansey’s suite on his way up to the roof. It had gotten cold, and Ronan’s leather jacket offered almost no insulation, so he just wanted to grab a couple hats and maybe a blanket before heading up to the roof.

Of course, Matthew Lynch stopped him in his tracks.

“Did you find Ronan yet?!”

Adam shook his head. “Still looking. Gansey told me about another place I haven’t checked yet.”

“Okay,” Matthew said before handing Adam a brown paper bag.

Adam frowned. “What is this?”

“Well, you both pretty much missed dinner, so I filled up some plastic containers for you,” he said. “They should still be warm. There are forks and knives in there too.”

“I—thank you, Matthew.”

“I had to do something while I waited,” Matthew shrugged. “Now I’m working on this.”

He turned around in his seat and gestured at the kitchen table, on which rested a medium-size square canvas. From the underlying design, Adam recognized it as one of the ones that Ronan had elected to squirt paint over rather than completely mutilate, but it was getting harder and harder to make that distinction. Matthew was methodically covering every inch of the canvas in a gentle, chrysanthemums-at-sunrise yellow.

“You’re repainting one of Ronan’s canvases?” Adam asked in surprise.

Matthew shrugged. “He said he was having trouble with his happiness assignment. I thought this might help.”

Adam looked at the bag of food in his hands, at the serene smile on Matthew’s face, and at the yellow canvas. For the first time, he understood why Ronan had such a soft spot for Noah Czerny.

“Paint fast,” he said. “Ronan will be back soon.”

He draped one of Gansey’s spare blankets over his shoulders and took the stairs as high as he was allowed to go, and then higher. The door to the roof read, Locked: Authorized Access Only, but when he pushed on it, it swung open.

Adam poked his head out. The wind whistled in his one good ear, making it difficult to hear anything.

He squinted into the darkness.

“Ronan?”

@reytrashqueen @nymphhadora @thehufflepuffshuffle @thegreywarenloveshim @siriiusblcck @thefangirldiaries98 @adamprrishcycle @xerxesians @lirapheus @sacrebleusargent @laniemoriarty @actuallyronanlynch @iridescentsparrows @sapphicclary

#pynch #trc #pynch fic #pynch fanfiction #adam parrish #ronan lynch #i wrote this #kotib #kids of the in between #gangsey #otp: the ocean burned #otp: scio quid hoc est

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